CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/25/2021

Intimate, imaginary and emotionally charged spaces in 'Shara Hughes: Landscapes'

“Thin Air” (2016) is reproduced from Shara Hughes: Landscapes. Featuring 120 color reproductions, an interview of the artist by Ian Alteveer and a text by Mia Locks, this gorgeous book also happens to be the first in-depth survey of the acclaimed Brooklyn painter. “Despite having produced hundreds of landscape paintings since 2014, Shara Hughes isn’t a landscape painter per se," Locks writes. “These paintings are less concerned with depicting nature than they are with creating intimate, imaginary, and emotionally charged spaces. Hughes isn’t as interested in landscape as a subject as she is in using the genre of landscape painting as a frame for the tensions inherent in the act of painting. These works, no matter how charming or picturesque, are containers for ongoing struggle, and giving form to these conflicts is her way of creating space, literally and figuratively—not for catharsis or externalizing emotion as an end in itself, but for testing compositional strategies. To this end, Hughes’s landscape paintings are models for working with and through consciousness as an artistic process. This is pretty serious work.”